A Randori with Corey Haines

After I first introduced myself to a complete stranger (I swear he really looked like Corey Haines :))…
I then walked to (the real and smiling) Corey Haines and got us to the car to get to our location.

It was a fun evening coding. Around 10 people came and we mainly focussed on coding. I want to share one of the highlighting moments (to me) of that evening.

A Randori.

I never did a Randori before, but I really liked this form of group programming, so let me share this with you. Perhaps you might want to try it yourself with a group of developers you know.

So what is a Randori?
If I had to put it in one sentence: A Randori is a pair-group-rotating-programming session.

What we did
We did a Kata, but not all by ourselves… we did it all together.

But how did we do it as a group? Basically it works like this:
You have one person controlling the computer (called the Driver). Another person, called the Navigator, has a say in what should be made (design-wise). The Driver and the Navigator form a pair.

The rest of the people (the Audience) has a role as well:
When doing the Kata (in TDD of course), while you are in the red phase (test fails), the Audience must remain silent while the Driver and Navigator try to get the test to green (test passes). The Driver and Navigator may talk and work it out. Once the test is green, the refactor phase starts, the Audience is allowed to bring in suggestions. Want to shut up the audience? Write a failing test 😉

After a few minutes (in our case 5 minutes) you switch roles:Navigator becomes DriverDriver becomes Audience member
someone from the Audience becomes Driver

That’s a whole ‘session’. Reset the timer, and continue with the Kata where the previous pair left off.

Since you cannot write new code without a failing test, the Navigator is obliged to write (or let the Driver write to be more exact) a failing test first.

To avoid major rewrites of the code, there is a restriction to the Navigator. He may only refactor big changes after introducing an amount of new tests. Only when the tests pass, the Navigator may introduce major design changes.

So why is this fun?

It is fun for several reasons:
– It resembles a real world problem, where you have to work with existing code (and you can’t change the whole design because you feel like it).
– It’s fun to have short discussions about the code and its design
– You learn a lot from others when discussing code and design
– You learn how Java sucks by having no String.join() 😉

Picture or it did not happen!
Here you can see Corey Haines (at the left) in the session, looking at code that Arjen (at the right) is typing. And yes, I am taking this picture so you don’t see me on it of course! 🙂

Recap
Doing a Kata is a fun excersise alone. If you are with a group of people you could consider doing a Randori, and have fun coding together. The Kata itself is only the means to pair program, fix a problem, in existing code you did not write and trying to

Practical: What do you need
– A group of people (around 10 people)
– A computer with a dev environment installed (testing framework required)
– A big screen / a beamer

Thanks!
Special thanks to Corey Haines for coming over and let us have this experience!

Footnote: Later Arjen, Daniel and I had worked on the LED Kata again in a teamviewer session. We made a working solution (we wanted to crack the problem badly), which is also on Github.